Ah the satisfying click of everything slotting correctly into place as you squeeze the handles of a good quality RJ45 crimp tool. Less satisfying is the realisation that the snagless boot is still in the component drawer behind you. Distinctly irritating is experiencing the latter twice in one day.
When I was an apprentice telephone man the gang I was with got called to help another gang who were ‘pulling in’
1 a big expensive coaxial trunk cable. It was practice with BECTCs to pull half of it in one way, take the rest of the drum and pull that in the other way because BECTCs are
HEAVY and not only does half have less than half the friction, there’s also less chance of it stretching, something to be avoided with paper insulated BECTC because it can affect their transmission characteristics. So the gang doing the job had laid out the second half in the approved flaked pattern and the gang leader had gone with the truck and winch to the pulling out end. Here things become less clear because the gang junior says he asked their apprentice to pass him the end, and the apprentice swears blind he was only watching. Regardless, the gang junior duly fastened the pulling tackle to the end of the cable and fed it into duct. With less than a few yards to go, ie well into the last loop, it was discovered that the lamp post near to the carriageway box was looped by the cable. Much cursing ensued, caps were wrung and feet shuffled. The Inspector was called and a Simon platform called for. That’s when they realised just how much trouble they were in as there wasn’t enough cable loose to go over the street lamp.
1. It used to be that telephone cables were pulled into ducts by draw ropes that were usually left in situ. The underground gangs had some of the dimmer end of the spectrum of employees, and they tended to think us apprentices were a bit ‘posh’. We only spent the first six months with the external teams to gain an appreciation of the network, but it was quite an eye opener for us mostly ‘grammar school boys‘ in more ways than one
